Bad medicine: Schiavo autopsy reinforces how her final days were misused

BAD MEDICINESchiavo autopsy reinforces how opportunistic politicians misused her final days

Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Published
5:30 am CDT, Friday, June 17, 2005

Is it too much to expect that officeholders will now stop playing doctor? Probably.

And that's most unfortunate, because the report of a scrupulous post-mortem on the body of Terri Schiavo illustrates once more why politicians, all the way up to the White House, should have stayed out of the case.

Instead they made an unseemly circus of Schiavo's debilitation and death.

This will come as news to, among others, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a doctor, who took a look at a 4-year-old videotape and came to a different conclusion regarding the prospects that Schiavo might come out of the vegative state in which she had languished for more than a decade. That silly performance will rightly haunt what is expected to be his quest for the presidency.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had been less authoritative, but as imaginative. DeLay insisted that Schiavo's condition had been "misrepresented by the media."

Now, with the autopsy, we know who was doing the misrepresentation — not to mention the exploitation of a sad, family-riving tragedy.

There seemed to be a modest sense of remorse on the part of some Republicans in the wake of the medical report. But that may have been because they saw how sharply the public reacted against their meddling. Some Republicans spoke in terms of their public-relations fiasco, not their simple wrongheadedness.

If they unexpectedly have learned a lesson, the methodology is immaterial.